If you’ve been following the AI industry, Mistral should be a familiar name by now. The French AI startup with a valuation of $6 billion is probably the largest AI company working on foundation models in Europe.
Alan, on the other hand, is not as well known. The health insurance unicorn has quietly grown to become a digital companion to your health. Over 680,000 people are covered by Alan’s insurance in a handful of countries.
The connection between these two companies is Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, co-founding CEO of Alan and co-founding advisor of Mistral.
Bloomberg published a curious story explaining its role and some insights into Mistral’s origin story. “Arthur Mensch is the public face of French AI champion Mistral, but the CEO of another startup was key to its $6 billion valuation,” Bloomberg wrote. While Samuelian Werve has been listed as a co-founded advisor since Mistral’s inception, no one had quite given him that much credit in the founding and growth of the French AI company.
According to Bloomberg, Samuelian Werve saw the AI boom coming before the release of Chatgpt. He first approached Xavier Niel, the telecom billionaire behind Station F and Kima Ventures, about creating an artificial intelligence nonprofit.
But when Werve Samuelano met with Arthur Mensch and the other co-founders of Mistral, he dropped the nonprofit idea in favor of what is now known as put. It is around the same time that Alan’s other co-founder and CTO Charles Gorintin and former digital minister Cédric O also became founding advisors of the Paris-based AI Juggernaut.
According to Bloomberg, Samuelian Werve convinced Lightspeed to lead the Mistral seed and reached out to many of the investors who ended up backing the AI startup. We reached out to Mistral for a response to the story and the credit it gives to the Samuelian Werve in its founding and growth. We will update this post with any new information we receive.
In February 2024, Samuelian Werve mentioned his interest in artificial intelligence when presenting Alan’s financial results.
“We continue to invest in AI at Alan. As you may know, I am a co-founder and board member of Misral. But this just represents the fact that we have been investing in AI for a long time at Alan – even before the buzz of generative AI – both to reduce our operating costs, be the most efficient on the market, provide the best services and also to create new services,” Samuelian-Werve said at the time. “And certainly in 2024 we’ll be announcing some new services that are related to generative AI and that are very exciting for us.”
In November 2024, Alan introduced an AI-powered chatbot called Mo. What makes Mo different from regular chatbots is that responses are checked by a doctor within 15 minutes. They can confirm medical advice or correct what was said in the conversation.
As for Xavier Niel? He ended up funding Kyutai, a French AI research lab focused on developing (truly) open source AI. But he didn’t completely part ways with Mistral, as he also invested in Mistral’s seed round.
Today, Mistral’s office is still located in the same building as Alan’s office, near the Saint-Martin canal in Paris. Samuelian-Werve and Mensch meet once a week again to discuss Mistral’s strategy. Alan is also a distressed shareholder.
In the Bloomberg profile, Werve Samueliano reiterated that Mistral is not for sale, confirming what Mensch said a few days ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos. This topic – as well as the connection between Alan and Mistral – will surely come up once again next month during the Ai Action summit in Paris. But it’s worth remembering that you often hear that a company is not for sale when a company AND for sale – or at least that some shareholders are applying pressure to sell.
